Angel Sanctuary is a huge (it happily counts 20 volumes) Japanese manga comic inspired by the jewish/christian concept of angels. My advice is read it. It is a great comic where good and evil are blurred and concepts such as gender, incest, sin, god, revenge, existence are constantly being discussed in a fresh perspective. They might share similarities but personally, I find it much better than Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. I wish I was patient enough to write a long analysis on it. Instead, I will now focus on a single character: demon Belial or “Mad Hatter”.
I was so impressed by this:
Belial as the heart of the story
A finely written commentary in Mad Hatter’s point of view, so accurate it aches. Most points the writer makes contain the greatest deal of insight I’ve seen concerning Angel Sanctuary.
Belial was a free-spirited, promiscuous angel. According to AS’ mythology, angels are born without sex but they get one at some point. Belial took pills to forcefully stop her own change and thus was never fully transformed into any of the two sexes; she technically is a woman but she’s flat-chested and has narrow hips and also, dresses solely as a man. This change was a sin and she was banished from heaven.
What is interesting about Belial is that she was sexually active both before and after the transformation that never fully took place. Therefore, she remains a sexual being even without a clear sex. Her name means “worthless”, given to her by god since she was destined to be a jester. “Worthless” was what she chose to be, embracing the title with Pride (she is the demon of pride, after all): she said no to a tyranny of gender and was punished for it. Yet – in a very Paradise Lost way – we see the demons in this story aching and suffering like humans, paying for their lost innocence with a knowledge sweeter than anything. She looks infinitely sad; a sadness only a miltonian rebel angel could have.
Belial rebelled against a sex and gender imposed on her without her consent. She chose to stay somewhere in between, mocking the whole notion like the jester she was. She has a devoted love for Lucifer, exactly because it’s one-sided: if he reciprocates, she’ll leave him. Apparently contrary to her character as a demon of Pride, Belial sees in Lucifer her own rebellion and her own fears: is she truly free? Or is she now trapped in no-gender?
Is freedom from genders in a world defined by them, really freedom? Or is it a very special, lonely kind of new prison?
